San Francisco -- Who knew a "Bejeweled"-style puzzle game with RPG elements would become the year's sleeper hit?
Infinite Interactive's Steve Fawkner didn't.
At one of the final sessions during the Game Developers Conference last week, the CEO and Lead Designer of the Australian-based studio talked about how they created "Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords," which was released on multiple platforms last year.
According to Fawkner, the idea for "Puzzle Quest" came about pretty easily. "I really like 'Bejeweled,' and I really like RPGs," he said. The game was originally called "Warlords Champions," but after some focus testing done by D3 Publisher, it was changed to be more appealing to both hardcore and casual gamers as well as more androgynous to lure to both genders (although no one liked the name at first). Focus testing also led to a change in the game's graphical style; it was originally more in the vein of the medieval-style "Warlords" but was altered to something "more Eastern-oriented" and "heavily anime."
One of the biggest lessons learned was that there were too many words in "Puzzle Quest." The game had over 100,000 words, which caused painstaking localization issues for French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese. "You should not construct sentences as a designer," Fawkner warned. To boot, he found that players were often skipping the lengthy conversations within the game anyway.
However, Fawkner promised that the new science-fiction-themed "Puzzle Quest" called "Galactrix" will be different. The game will have more "dynamic conversations" and fewer words, all written by an actual scriptwriter. While the basic gameplay will remain intact (a match-three puzzle game played against an opponent), the game will have more varied missions, "all sorts of other mechanics" (like forging items not included in missions), "a more dynamic world" and better scaling of difficulty.
Fawkner also insisted that there was no "AI cheating" or "reverse cheating" in "Challenge of the Warlords," referring to how gamers have complained about the the AI opponent getting too many lucky breaks. "The AI does not cheat... I'm too lazy to write cheat AI," he insisted, causing laughter around the room. He did say that the AI will perform better "anti-cheating," where it looks at the board, identifies if there is going to be a lucky drop for the AI player and then responds accordingly to avoid that lucky drop.
Overall, Fawkner said that they'll give greater respect to "what the casual gamer wants." He cited a story where a player clearly didn't understand the RPG aspect of the game. The player asked, "What are the purple stars for?" The company replied that they were for "experience points." The player then asked, "Why am I getting experience?" They responded, "You're getting experience to get to higher levels." The player then wrote back, "Why am I getting to higher levels?"
Hopefully this doesn’t mean a water-downed version of the game, but we’ll find out soon enough when "Puzzle Quest: Galactrix" is released later this year for PC, PSP, DS, Xbox Live Arcade and "possibly Apple Mac," according to the official website. [UPDATE 2/26: The official website has been changed to state "PC, Xbox 360 Live Arcade and Nintendo DS," removing the PSP and "possibly Apple Mac" versions.]
[UPDATE 2/29: I asked D3 about the disappearing versions. Here's their response.]
["Galactrix" image taken by camera off the presentation screen. The image looked sharper in real life.]
Comments